Ensuring customer delight

1. Ensuring Customer Delight
When a brand meets customer expectations, it is ensuring customer satisfaction.
However, when customers gets value or benefits beyond what they had expected, the
brand has ensured customer delight. Common sense suggests that a delighted
customer would be more loyal to your brand than a satisfied customer.
Customer delight, in most cases, is not about better product performance. Consumers
have a certain degree of functional expectation from a brand and, in most cases, the
brand is likely to deliver a level of performance pretty close to that expected by the
customer. This is precisely the reason why functional parameters have ceased to be
meaningful differentiators for customers to choose one brand over the other.
So what is customer delight all about? How does a brand ensure customer
delight?
Customer Delight is about demonstrating and providing a set of tangible and intangible
benefits beyond the functional features, a combination of which provides value beyond
what the customer had expected to receive from the brand.
It is important to recognize that customer delight is a moving target. It is not a fixed
benchmark to be achieved. As competition intensifies and responds, the power of some
benefits to act as differentiators gets diluted or erased. Brands therefore have to
constantly monitor customer satisfaction and delight levels in relation to competitive
offerings and then create more and innovative value propositions for customers to
continue to feel delighted.
In many categories, brands have taken the easy route of providing higher value through
lower price. However, not only is there no guarantee of it being a sustainable advantage
(because it is replicable by other players too) but it also strips the brand of much needed
profitability to create and sustain alternate benefits. Apart from a sensible price point,
customers look at brand imagery, service and other intangible parameters for selecting
between brands. For a brand that seeks to provide ever increasing service levels and
standards, competing on price will seriously limit its ability to invest in technology and
resources to provide the desired service levels.

2. In a digitally enabled business environment, it has become relatively easier for brand to
plan and implement strategies to provide customer delight. Though it requires an initial
investment in time, resources and technology, creating a robust database of customers
is the first step in making the task of providing continued customer delight easier and
efficient for the organization.
Some of the ways of ensuring customer delight through a customer base which is
captured digitally are:
- Loyalty programmes: Providing incentives for customers to stay with your brand
- Collaborative marketing: Leveraging the power of your database to get other
relevant brands to provide incentives to your database
- Proactive marketing: Identifying customer needs well ahead so as to supply them
with information/service and to help them in deciding on a purchase
- Cross-selling: Identifying the most relevant products from your portfolio that your
customer will benefit from and offer it to them… perhaps at an incentive for being
a member of your brand.
- Single service window: the ability to recognize a customer as a single entity
across the many products/.services that your organization may have marketed to
him
- 24x7 support: initiatives like call centers and help desks are rendered more
effective by use of a customer information module
In each of these initiatives (and more that are possible), it is possible to offer an ever
increasing set of benefits. It is left to the dynamism and innovative spirit of the
organization to harness it to the max.

3. Prajakt Raut
prajakt.raut@gmail.com
Prajakt has over 23 years of experience as an entrepreneur, marketing professional and
business strategy consultant. Prajakt primarily consults early stage companies on strategy,
focusing on business model & monetization and on creating processes to prepare the
company for growth.
Prajakt is the co-founder of Orange Cross, a healthcare services management company
and an internet based venture, currently in stealth mode.
Prajakt is passionate about entrepreneurship. Prajakt’s personal goal in life is to
instigate, inspire and assist a 100,000 people to become entrepreneurs.
Prior to his current ventures, Prajakt was the Asia Director for TiE (The Indus
Entrepreneurs), a global non-profit organization focused on promoting entrepreneurship.
At TiE, Prajakt was primarily focused on helping entrepreneurs in India connect with the
emerging early-stage investor community. Prajakt also helped create interconnectivity
between overseas investors and Indian entrepreneurs.
Prajakt has spent over a decade in advertising and marketing companies including Grey,
Madison DMB&B and Capital. Prajakt was also part of the founding team of a printing
business and a CRM solutions company.
Based in Delhi, Prajakt continues to volunteer time at NEN (National Entrepreneurship
Network) to assist aspiring entrepreneurs in their entrepreneurial journey.
Prajakt is also a self-taught designer and because of his deep personal interest as well
as past experience in advertising, enjoys brainstorming and marketing & communication
designing.